Next week I’m making my first public performance playing electronic music.
A DJ (my wife) will mix some songs and I will play life on some of the loops. On some of them, I’ll only add some effects or ambient sounds, and in some others I’ll improvise in a more jazzy sense.
I don’t want to bring a lot of machines to keep it simple, and the selected ones are the digitone and the analog four, controlled by a keystep37. Typhon was the finalist, but the A4 seems more capable with all the performance macros.
So, to those who are more experienced playing life, do you have some quick tips to share?
I played a few live sets with my Timefactor in feedback mode with no input other than a contact mike.
My main challenge seemed to be filling up 45 minutes with knob turning. So I did a few practice sessions, noted sweet spots where the knobs did interesting things and then sliced my time up into 12 minute sections. Then I noted a few ideas for each section, wrote the whole thing up on a notecard and bought a kitchen timer.
The first time I played the set I experienced serious time dilation for about 30 seconds. It felt like I was encased in molasses or amber or something. But I had my timer running and could see I had 11 minutes left, so I just kept very slowly turning knobs. After a little bit the panic subsided and I played through my set without incident.
There was a baby crying for the first 20 minutes, but unfortunately I didn’t bring a mic for the baby and the parents left.
